Game Details

Don't waste your time comparing the latest South Park video game to its virtual predecessors. Up until this week, every game starring Stan, Cartman, Kyle, and Kenny has been tolerable at best and a miserable cash-in at worst. They're the kind of products you'd expect from a cartoon series that, during its late-'90s prime, had its characters slapped on every product imaginable. So yes, South Park: The Stick of Truth is better than the corny trivia game Chef's Luv Shack. That's not saying much.

A much better point of context comes from the only South Park-related production that could possibly compare: 1999's South Park: Bigger, Longer, And Uncut. It's incredible to think, it's been 15 years since Matt Stone and Trey Parker pulled off a feature-length treatment of their first TV series, and a lot has changed in their quiet little mountain town over that span. Manbearpig, evil sea otters, Mysterion—the show has gone in enough directions to require a guidebook just to keep up.

That wasn't the case in 1999, and as such, SP:BLU managed to remain surprisingly tight and focused, as opposed to TV-to-film adaptations that meander and get lost in fan service. It's unlikely that South Park, at this point in its lifespan, could play host to another film that was anywhere near as enjoyable.

Maybe it doesn't need to, though. The Stick of Truth reaches movie-caliber levels of polish and quality, thanks to the TV series' staff taking on most of the writing, animation, and voice duties. The game also proves how adept that crew can be at writing and orchestrating a 12-hour video game, one that overflows with an almost excessive amount of fan service. The Stick of Truth would bomb as merely a video game or merely as a film, but as a combination, it proves to be one of the most impressive pop culture collisions I've seen in years.

Of course, such praise comes with a standard South Park-ian caveat: This game is lewd, crude, and shameless on all counts. If you've seen the spoiler-filled lists of content that had to be censored in overseas editions of the game, you've gotten just a hint of the game's level of sexual, violent, vulgar, racial, and scatological content.

We'll get to why that stuff succeeds, but first, there's the matter of the game itself. TSoT drops you into the shoes of a new boy who's moved to South Park with simple parental instructions to get out of the house and make friends. From there, you meet Cartman, a "grand wizard" in a magician's hat who leads the medieval-themed "Kingdom of the Kupa Keep" (yep, it goes there). He enlists your help in protecting, and eventually recovering, the game's titular stick of truth. In reality, it's nothing more than a dumb twig, but that doesn't stop the series' fourth graders from wrapping their battle of humans and elves in an over-complicated, fantasy-rich adventure.

Structurally, the game is a standard JRPG. You wander through South Park, complete fetch quests, and get into Super Mario RPG-styled, turn-based battles in which you tap buttons at the right moment to pull off better attacks and blocks. Since this is South Park, the attacks are goofy: Light a fart on fire, activate Cartman's shocking V-chip, summon Mr. Hankey to unleash a fecal version of Fantasia's "The Sorcerer's Tale," and so on. The South Park style of sophomoric humor also shines through in a selectable "Jew" class, with a debilitating "circum-scythe" attack, alongside the standards like "Mage" and "Fighter." (If you pick the Jew class, Cartman immediately remarks that he can no longer be friends with you.)

Those humorous touches can grow incredibly stale in video game form. After you watch Jimmy use a horn to play the "brown note" 20 times, the joke's more than over. That might be why the combat portions of the game are incredibly easy, not to mention why you can attack enemies outside of combat to avoid fights altogether. On normal difficulty, I only occasionally faced off against overpowering foes, but because money is so easy to get in TSoT, I learned to use items to handily win even the worst fights.

Enlarge/ Before uploading this image, we almost forgot to blur the weapon our hero was wielding against Al Gore.

Where TSoT succeeds, then, is in keeping its plot moving. The primary story, a goofily epic conflict between Cartman and Kyle, is frequently interspersed with quests that require doing favors for, say, the goth kids or the all-girl, "sparkle"-loaded club, not to mention the kinds of over-the-top plot interruptions that you'd expect from Stone and Parker (in this case, a giant government conspiracy that revolves around Taco Bell).

Even better, the game's optional side-quest content contains some of its most memorable, fall-down-funny moments, from rescuing Mr. Hankey's lost children in a sewer to saving the owner of City Wok from a band of Mongols. For years, South Park has suffered from episodes whose summaries are funnier than their execution; TSoT solves this problem by distilling hilarious joke concepts into brief side quests that often poke fun at gaming conventions.

Plus, scatter-shot blips of fan service fit more neatly as optional gaming side content than they would as pace-slowing stuff in a full-length movie. In this sense, TSoT's constant stream of characters from the series' 17-season run feels organic, dense, and busy rather than frustrating. For example, Al Gore's appearance as a Manbearpig hunter could drag the game down—yes, we've seen the joke before—but instead, the game uses this moment to sell a brand-new kind of joke through a fake Facebook feed feature, which sees every friend you make in the game posting random comments on your pause screen. This leads to one of the better quest names ever seen in a game: "Unfriend Al Gore."

You can't describe the game's other clever plays on gaming conventions without spoiling the jokes, but while the game's RPG trappings aren't exactly exciting or interesting to play through, it rarely feels slow or stodgy, especially since the jokes and dialogue just keep coming. (In a funny twist, the game's slowest portion has been designed deliberately to mock its setting, so it gets a pass.) The same can't be said for the vulgar content; if you don't share an affinity with South Park's love of anuses, cartoon breasts, swearing, and bloody explosions of cardboard cut-out characters, the pacing and execution of that stuff won't change your mind.

More importantly, if you're not an encyclopedic South Park fan, you might feel a little lost looking for The Stick of Truth. To get comfortable with the game's endless stream of references and jokes, you're expected to know that Mr. Hankey has an alcoholic wife, or that City Wok is a longtime show institution, or even that Cartman once tried to get Token to date a fellow African-American student.

That being said, the game strikes a really good balance between newer gags and older, long-forgotten characters, so whether you're a newer fan or a long-lost South Park freak, you'll probably have an entry point. Really, how long has it been since Uncle Jimbo and Ned figured significantly in a South Park episode, anyway?

Think you can just walk into any house in an RPG? Not in a South Park RPG.

No quest in South Park is complete without a little sparkling.

Good thing Stan Marsh signed up for Obamacare.

Ultimately, comparing TSoT to SP:BLU hinges on that very point—that the video game incarnation is tuned primarily for series diehards, as opposed to the long-ago film's ability to amuse old and new fans alike. Yet for that to be the sole distinction says a lot about the game's impeccable writing, its seamless gameplay, and heck, even the way the game looks and sounds exactly like the TV series (complete with Trey Parker voicing nearly all of the game's hours and hours of dialogue).

Funny to think that this—a game on "dated" console hardware consisting almost entirely of dinky, cardboard characters—pushes the boundaries of what we should expect from "next generation" entertainment from here on out. But screw you guys, I'm gonna go play some more South Park: The Stick of Truth.